Bob Dylan, World News, and the Argument from Design

12Dec09

Bob Dylan claims to have made a Christmas album. I submit that it is not possible for Bob Dylan to make a Christmas album, because the lyrics of Christmas songs are so familiar as to be decipherable by just about everyone, and any song with decipherable lyrics is by definition not a Bob Dylan song.

Any moment now someone is going to “discover” the Christmas album Kurt Cobain never released. Probably in the same box with L. Ron Hubbard’s “latest book.”

In case you’re into evolution, or just want to smack fundies who say things like “but the eye! The eye can’t have evolved from anything! The eye is perfect just as it is! Even Darwin could not explain the eye!”, read Andrew Parker’s In the Blink of an Eye, in which he explains not only the evolution of the eye from a spot of light-sensitive cells, but also explains the entire Cambrian explosion therefrom.

It’s not particularly well-written – he’s one of those who leaves his thesis until *after* he’s explained it and also thinks “orientate” is a word – but his solution is elegant and so wonderfully self-evident one wonders why Darwin *didn’t* think of it. (Answer: Darwin was into earthworms and finches, not things what live in the dark underwater. Also, Darwin predated the discovery of the Burgess Shale.)

NBC Nightly News-Flavored Pablum last night had a piece on how rising sea levels due to global warming are drowning Bangladeshis out of their homes and farms and driving half a million of them a year to the capital, where they’re mostly dying in the slums. This was followed immediately by a story on how the CEO of Virgin is building private-use spacefaring vehicles so rich weirdos can be blasted into the upper atmosphere and “experience how fragile the Earth is.”

You want to experience how fragile the Earth is? GO TO BANGLADESH WHY DON’T YOU.

I had really hoped NBC Nightly Blech couldn’t get any weirder than that, but then I watched the following night, in which I learned that President Obama had proposed helping out small business with some of the leftover, un-spent TARP FUNDS, and the Republicans – the small-business-promoting, Joe-the-Plumber-loving Republicans….

…said no.

No, said the Republicans. No, we will not take this money we were going to spend on this other thing but we ended up not having to spend it on that and use it to fund small businesses instead. Even though we say we love small business and totally want them to keep voting for us. We do totally still love them, just not enough to give them any money.